I was wondering what are some good science journals (by good, I mean reputable).

I hear that Science is a good one. Is that the name of it? Just Science? And is something I can subscribe to like a magazine?

I basically just want to keep up with science and technology but don't want to look at all the crap they put in Pop Mechanics and the like.

I used to subscribe to Science News and liked it because it was pretty small and readable, but I have know idea how reputable it was?

Any thoughts?

Casey

If you are amateur, to publish your document in reputable journal is impossible.
They reject all of amateurs' submission without reviewing.
Physics Review Letters and Physics Review Series are reputable journals.
I have not found amateurs' article in those journals.
Journals do not openly declare that, but that is real editorial policy.

If you are amateur, to publish your document in reputable journal is impossible.
They reject all of amateurs' submission without reviewing.
Physics Review Letters and Physics Review Series are reputable journals.
I have not found amateurs' article in those journals.
Journals do not openly declare that, but that is real editorial policy.

That's good to know; but I am not interested in being published, just in reading those who have

Most libraries in university science departments would carry Science and Nature. If you live near a university, you could make a habit of visiting there every week or two and reading those journals, as well as others.

BioMedCentral (BMC) is a publisher that pioneered the open source publishing, they follow a strict peer-review system so there is screening at the door. They have an impact factor of about 5, so I think you can call that average. You won't find the ground breaking research in there, but the articles are not bad.

I like the editorials of Science and Nature, I wish that they'd had paper subscriptions on only that part (thus cheaper than the whole journal). You should keep in mind that Science in Nature do not have the highest impact factor, a journal like Cell for instance scores higher, but they do cover a wider ground.

Ah! I almost forgot: visit the sites of the different journals and subscribe to their podcasts, those are really fun to listen to (they interview the researchers that have published interesting articles about their findings).

One way to track your interests is to look at on-line e-prints of papers on ArXiv.http://arxiv.org/

As you open the PDFs of the papers, look at the headers. Papers that have been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal will be identified in the headers. Papers that have only the author(s) name(s) and no "Accepted for Publication" statement probably have not been peer-reviewed.

Some journals have some pretty heavy subscription fees, and this is the only way to see their papers (usually pre-publication) without trekking to a good library or paying a lot of money. Interestingly, if your paper is accepted by Springer for one of its journals, Springer will request that you submit the final draft to ArXiv. They will also transmit the paper electronically to their subscribers AND in print form, later.